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94ac0691-c74f-4730-a28b-7e2a7d0a70e3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Parameter vs Synapse?
In terms of AI timelines, the biggest question I haven't seen addressed is the computational equivalence of a synapse vs a parameter in modern neural nets. This seems like a very important input for any prediction on when we will have human-level AI.
Moravec's estimates of a retina vs the then-c... |
cd01d7a4-c090-4a9b-97a8-111709a4c479 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Will Values and Competition Decouple?
There are a great many forces shaping the evolution of the universe. Among them, the values of agents -- systems which attempt to optimize, or steer the future towards certain configurations over others -- seem likely to have a dominant influence on the long-term future. The value... |
05c665e7-696f-4f45-b56b-c340a413bbec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The WASH-1400 Reactor Safety Study
In Intelligence Explosion analysis draft: introduction, Luke Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon wrote
> Norman Rasmussen's (1975) analysis of the safety of nuclear power plants, written before any nuclear accidents had occurred, correctly predicted several details of the Three Mile Island... |
e2f71dde-1ad9-4664-a9de-987fe810e7aa | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | My Arrogant Plan for Alignment
Preface: Most of my predictions have great uncertainty when it comes to AI development and alignment, and I have great respect for the predictions of others.
However, I thought it might be fun and useful to write a plan based solely on predictions I would make if I assumed my predictio... |
0ff9c6df-ecc8-427c-917d-70fd4ce7cf91 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Branching Time Active Inference: empirical study and complexity class analysis
1 Introduction
---------------
Active inference extends the free energy principle to generative models with actions (Friston et al., [2016a](#bib.bib16); Da Costa et al., [2020](#bib.bib10); Champion et al., [2021b](#bib.bib7)) and can b... |
fe680377-16d7-4c9e-86f2-f176a7b946ef | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How can I reconcile the two most likely requirements for humanities near-term survival.
1. We technologically plateau, due to humanities questionable ability to adapt to accelerating technological progression.
2. AI development is indefinitely disrupted; as it is likely to result in disaster.
* This is unlikely to ... |
648b9b03-bd8e-454a-8c1e-e4601fc8ddea | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | (notes on) Policy Desiderata for Superintelligent AI: A Vector Field Approach
***Meta:** I thought I'd spend a little time reading the policy papers that Nick Bostrom has written. I made notes as I went along, so I spent a little while cleaning them up into a summary post. These are my notes on Bostrom, Dafoe and Flyn... |
7606e702-64ae-4080-836c-b2510d4954dc | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | AI Safety Camp, Virtual Edition 2023
AI Safety Camp connects you with an experienced research lead to collaborate on a research project – helping you try your fit for a potential career in AI Safety research.
*The applications for AI Safety Camp’s Virtual Edition in 2023 are* [*now open*](https://airtable.com/shrNF1n... |
2ffa4ee8-2446-4149-a74c-8e4822125658 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Two Agent Mild Optimization
|
dd9d7069-b98a-4665-9193-9a3ac6bd5e6e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Asya Bergal: Reasons you might think human-level AI is unlikely to happen soon
---
*If we knew that human-level AI couldn’t be produced within the next 20 years, we would take different actions to improve the long-term future. Asya Bergal of* [*AI Impacts*](https://aiimpacts.org/) *talks about her investigations into... |
1bb70040-0208-40b4-b938-a9da214bd7cc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Reading First Meetup!
Discussion article for the meetup : Reading First Meetup!
WHEN: 07 October 2015 06:00:00PM (+0100)
WHERE: Reading, England
We'll be meeting in the Starbucks next to Vue cinema and the river Kennet, in the Oracle Shopping Centre (Riverside Entrance). I'll be there from 6pm and I'll sta... |
af1bd89c-cc08-4eba-ac7e-13ea30c77455 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | on Science Beakers and DDT
tech trees
There's a series of strategy games called Civilization. In those games, the player controls a country which grows and develops over thousands of years, and science is one of the main types of progress. It involves building facilities to generate research points, sometimes represen... |
b5649fa2-40e3-4ff6-85c1-89ea5bfe30e0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do you optimize productivity with respect to your menstrual cycle?
As the question asks, I am looking for productivity advice directly or indirectly related to one's menstrual cycle.
Motivation: This may seem like a gross or weirdly personal question but I think it's actually quite important. For example, for t... |
bd18aec8-b9a6-4445-a5b5-a448bc2bf63d | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Fortified Networks: Improving the Robustness of Deep Networks by Modeling the Manifold of Hidden Representations
1 Introduction
---------------
Deep neural networks have been very successful across a variety of tasks.
This success has also driven applications in domains where reliability and security are critical, ... |
b9a1a8be-43d9-4b85-a46b-f10cc1ff3ac7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | AI and the Technological Richter Scale
The Technological Richter scale is introduced about 80% of the way through Nate Silver’s new book On the Edge.
A full review is in the works (note to prediction markets: this post alone does NOT on its own count as a review, but this counts as part of a future review), but this ... |
5027442f-76f1-437f-ad33-dde3bb192dcd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach
I've run in to the argument that cryonics beats VillageReach on a simple "shut up and multiply" level, by assuming an infinity vs finite tradeoff. Having read the Fun Theory sequences, it struck me that this wasn't a reasonable assumption, so I sat down, re-read a few relevant pos... |
3813a0b6-790e-499a-81d9-64b45b13175f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | The Dumbest Possible Gets There First
This was written as part of the first Refine blog post day.
A sneaking suspicion that I’ve found difficult to shake off while following AI risk discussion is that concerns regarding superintelligent AI, while clearly valid and important, have seemed to me to be very plausibly jum... |
de16285c-4c00-41f1-8a44-3235a348a732 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Solving alignment isn't enough for a flourishing future
I'm sharing a paper I previously presented to the Stanford Existential Risks Conference in April 2023. In past years, much discussion of making the long-term future go well has focused on AI alignment and mitigating extinction risks. More recently, there has been... |
2a3e436d-7db4-4937-b72a-888b21585fd9 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Be secretly wrong
> "I feel like I'm not the sort of person who's allowed to have opinions about the important issues like AI risk."
>
> "What's the bad thing that might happen if you expressed your opinion?"
>
> "It would be wrong in some way I hadn't foreseen, and people would think less of me."
>
> "Do you think... |
9dee4ce5-0751-4f1c-a914-39e41ea975de | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [Closed] Hiring a mathematician to work on the learning-theoretic AI alignment agenda
UPDATE: The position is now closed. My thanks to everyone who applied, and also to those who spread the word.
The Association for Long Term Existence and Resilience (ALTER) is a new charity for promoting longtermist[1] causes based ... |
88388141-d785-4506-8296-6d7d4d83c198 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Would refining the question a bit be better in terms of getting to answers?
For instance, under what transportation demand scenarios would autonomous cars be more efficient? Not sure if one might want to further refine in terms of efficient -- time, operational costs, people moved, polution... |
be0b550c-303c-4a54-8696-394d5875add1 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Metaethical Perspectives on 'Benchmarking' AI Ethics
1. Introduction
----------------
Benchmarks are a key tool for measuring technical progress in artificial intelligence (AI) research. A variety of benchmark datasets have been developed to measure a model’s performance on particular tasks, such as question answer... |
979c79a6-ec95-4c90-8196-4fde20a03762 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others...
This was originally posted as part of the efficient charity contest back in November. Thanks to Roko, multifoliaterose, Louie, jmmcd, jsalvatier, and others I forget for help, corrections, encouragement, and bothering me until I finally remembered to post this here.
Imagine you ar... |
8f25066d-8869-4746-8068-9c5af900d9f3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Notes from a conversation with Ing. Agr. Adriana Balzarini
This post is part of my "research" series.
These are my notes from a 2022-04-22 conversation (in Spanish) with Adriana Balzarini Ingeniera Agrónoma. I met Adriana as part of the Board of Directors of the Partido de la Costa Science Club. The conversation wasn... |
93ce8516-bfdb-45b2-be6f-59f2e7d4ac8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We may be able to see sharp left turns coming
There's a lot of discourse around abrupt generalization in models, most notably the "sharp left turn." Most recently, Wei et al. 2022 claim that many abilities suddenly emerge at certain model sizes. These findings are obviously relevant for alignment; models may suddenly ... |
7b2d0cb6-b91a-4b79-936f-e60fd38d187b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | A Workflow with Spaced Repetition
This is a detailed description of my reading and learning workflow. You may find ideas to adopt, or maybe you can tell me what I could be doing differently!
Overview
I've been using Spaced Repetition on and Off for the past few years, and have built a solid Anki habit this last thre... |
68434ca5-a080-4e91-b9fc-35e05d48248c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Identities are [Subconscious] Strategies
We all have identities. Arguably, any statement of the form “I am a __” is an identity. Of course, we usually reserve the term for the statements which feel especially core to us in describing and predicting ourselves, and in expressing our values and aspirations. Such identiti... |
39855bc0-d15b-4472-8ab7-51aa771e21e5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How many generals does Russia have left?
I’ve come across a large number of articles talking about the unprecedented number of generals (7) killed so far during the current war (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/26/ukraine-russan-generals-dead/ for instance), but I can’t easily find information online a... |
bbda7047-423d-48f3-8db1-16c25aa644f4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/arxiv | Arxiv | Learning from learning machines: a new generation of AI technology to meet the needs of science
1 Introduction
---------------
Today, in science and engineering, the means by which we obtain hypotheses and models is taken for granted: it is human intuition—informed and constrained by data and deep domain knowledge.... |
f02f63ec-b9b0-46b7-a1ab-e1a087bc88f2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Second Order Retreat - June 13th to 16th
Hi all — I’m helping organize a small economics unconference that I think will be exciting for rational-ish people. It's coming up soon (June 13th-16th), but we have a few more spots available. More details below!
----------------------------------------
Second Order
Dates:... |
ecf26fee-fae7-44f3-ab02-79ec19a72f2c | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Classical Configuration Spaces
Today's post, Classical Configuration Spaces was originally published on 15 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> How to visualize the state of a system of two 1-dimensional particles, as a single point in 2-dimensional space. Understanding configuration space... |
9fd5dca4-16b5-4b81-91e6-335c04ee930e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Retrospective on the Summer 2021 AGI Safety Fundamentals
*Thanks to Jamie Bernardi, Caleb Parikh, Neel Nanda, Isaac Dunn, Michael Chen and JJ Balisanyuka-Smith for feedback on drafts of this document. All mistakes are my own.*
How to read this document
-------------------------
* If you're short on time, I recommend... |
6d175f97-488d-4434-8847-960abe857296 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Broadening Horizons: Rethinking Social Mobility Through Skill Diversification
Disclaimer
This article was polished with the assistance of ChatGPT to refine the language and structure. The ideas and content remain my own.
For decades, the idea of social mobility has centered on helping underprivileged individuals ... |
fa17feb2-fe8f-49d4-9ae7-7e96f470f351 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Skepticalcon
I know there is some overlap between the lesswrong community and the skeptics community. So my question is if anyone on lesswrong is going to skepticalcon this week and if so if you'd like to meet up there.
Oh and in case anyone is curious its in berkley,ca |
1b709abb-358a-45a8-9390-52d93228d13b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Ideological Inference Engines: Making Deontology Differentiable*
*\* Rather, making deontology play well with differentiable systems trained end-to-end.*
*This post is part of my* [*hypothesis subspace*](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/H3xEgE7bPGKvucfQk) *sequence, a living collection of proposals I'm exploring at* [*Ref... |
39c77012-fe10-4c1e-ba7e-bccb559dec3e | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | What is narrow value learning?
Ambitious value learning aims to achieve superhuman performance by figuring out the underlying latent "values" that humans have, and evaluating new situations according to these values. In other words, it is trying to infer the criteria by which we judge situations to be good. This is pa... |
be350052-362c-4c09-bafa-7aac6c5653b0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Beyond the Reach of God
Today's post is a tad gloomier than usual, as I measure such things. It deals with a thought experiment I invented to smash my own optimism, after I realized that optimism had misled me. Those readers sympathetic to arguments like, "It's important to keep our biases because they help us stay ... |
ed31dead-f4ed-4ae9-aa22-d0a3000ff08b | LDJnr/LessWrong-Amplify-Instruct | LessWrong | "When I found Less Wrong and started reading, when I made my first post, when I went to my first meetup….
It was a little like coming home.
And mostly it wasn’t. Mostly I felt a lot more out of place than I have in, say, church youth groups. It was hard to pinpoint the difference, but as far as I can tell, it comes dow... |
d9d0c1dd-dc4f-4aa4-8e13-33836263acd4 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | In defense of Oracle ("Tool") AI research
(*Update 2022:* Enjoy the post, but note that it’s old, has some errors, and is certainly not reflective of my current thinking. –Steve)
*Low confidence; offering this up for discussion*
An Oracle AI is an AI that only answers questions, and doesn't take any other actions.... |
6957b270-e3af-483d-95d6-2791700126bb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Breaking beliefs about saving the world
Goal = Save the world.
See Ending Ignorance | Solving Ignorance[1] & We can Survive for greater context. (Includes defining of terms like System, Functional, functional reality, functional system, functional systems psychology, High-level, tactical, conscious, subconscious, Re... |
8fd91041-004b-4465-91c1-03c5023200b5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Effectively self-studying over the Internet
The Internet is a great invention. Just about everything in humanity’s knowledge can be found on the Internet: with just a few keystrokes, you can find dozens of excellent quality textbooks, YouTube videos and blog posts about any topic you want to learn. The information is ... |
f62f2aea-a06e-4630-ac77-4c39f1072dbe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Why can’t a man be more like a woman?
Women are often encouraged to move into male dominated activities, such as engineering. This is not because overall interest in engineering appears to be lacking, but because women’s interest seems to be less than men’s. This is arguably for cultural reasons, so it is argued that ... |
59253295-046c-483e-9256-6324170b2c83 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is my result wrong? Maths vs intuition vs evolution in learning human preferences
The mathematical result is clear: you cannot deduce human preferences merely by observing human behaviour (even with simplicity priors).
Yet many people instinctively reject this result; even I found it initially counter-intuitive. And ... |
d737df4c-f919-4e20-bcee-7ba66e7ba539 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | SF Severe Weather Warning
Hope it's okay to post this here - I know we've got a lot of folks in the Bay Area.
Linked to the hackernews discussion as it qualifies the seriousness of the report, but I recommend reading the source too. |
c538d3c7-1f41-4ab6-aed2-adab03428fab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Belief in Belief
Title: [SEQ RERUN] Belief in Belief Tags: sequence_reruns Today's post, Belief in Belief was originally published on July 29, 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> Suppose someone claims to have a dragon in their garage, but as soon as you go to look, they say, "It's an invisible... |
15ec06f9-2b61-4a57-8b39-eb856e532976 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Empirical Observations of Objective Robustness Failures
Inner alignment and objective robustness have been frequently discussed in the alignment community since the publication of “Risks from Learned Optimization” (RFLO). These concepts identify a problem beyond outer alignment/reward specification: even if the reward... |
5bcf53d5-b082-45d3-8707-6244245e35f2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Modelling large-scale cyber attacks from advanced AI systems with Advanced Persistent Threats
Completed as part of the [ERA 2023 Fellowship](https://erafellowship.org/). A huge thanks to Shaun Ee and Moritz Von Knebel for wonderful research mentorship and management respectively. A 12 minute talk that summaries this ... |
fb6afce8-b9ac-44a8-b6fe-4993bf19e0cd | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Exercise Trade Offs
Update 9/2: A friend pointed out that I was ignoring the time costs of exercise, which ended up being pretty significant. See new numbers here. I then double checked the math on the microlife numbers and the news is not good.
Tl;dr: under my current conditions, outdoor exercise is slightly safer th... |
a881c625-dd56-4f16-a428-f6ab9a2f0257 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | “She Wanted It”
Epistemic Status: Things I Will Regret Writing
One of the most persistent arguments, often left implicit, that antifeminists have on their side is “Women want to be raped and abused.”
On one hand, this is an obvious logical contradiction if taken literally. Rape is unwanted sex — how can you want so... |
c49f17ff-6853-41af-bc27-21d6f06d5cdc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Let Your Workers Gather Food
Crocker's rules apply to this post, and to everything I post.
Also, after writing this post and googling LW for links I came up with this post, which presents the same ideas. #!@$%
When I was younger, I often played real-time strategy (RTS) computer games. These usually involve running ... |
7fe2cfde-33ff-4881-8e3c-27796a29db64 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Seeking Survey Responses - Attitudes Towards AI risks
**TL;DR we’re conducting a survey about attitudes towards AI risks, targeted towards people in the EA and rationality communities. We're interested in responses whether or not you're involved in AI safety.** [**Google Forms Link here**](https://forms.gle/QTm87WWMKo... |
dde4b4ed-afd5-4072-9e16-32d793134966 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Differential Optimization Reframes and Generalizes Utility-Maximization
Consider the following world: a set P of past nodes, a set of environment nodes E a set of actor/agent nodes A, and a set of future nodes F. Consider our previously defined function Op(A; p, f) for p∈P,f∈F, which represents how much A is optimizin... |
307d4a75-7339-4c0e-977d-a2c137024361 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Implications of the Whitehouse meeting with AI CEOs for AI superintelligence risk - a first-step towards evals?
Introducion
===========
On Wednesday 4th May, Sam Altman (Open AI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) - amongst others - met with US Vice President Kamala Harris (with a [drop-in from President Joe Biden](https:/... |
55bde909-2c23-4f73-a77a-07a8a01c2996 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/aisafety.info | AI Safety Info | What are OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot?
[OpenAI’s Codex](https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex) and [Github’s Copilot](https://github.com/features/copilot) are AIs that use Large Language Models (LLMs) to write and edit code. When given some input code and comments describing the intended function, they will write ou... |
792561de-0ff8-4e4b-96f4-1cd3c5f6d199 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Global Risks Weekly Roundup #19/2025: India/Pakistan ceasefire, US/China tariffs deal & OpenAI nonprofit control
Executive summary
* India and Pakistan have agreed to a ceasefire, and despite initial breaches, it now seems to be holding.
* The Trump administration and China agreed to reduce tariffs for 90 days while... |
ff727bff-598c-487e-92eb-36123339da91 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Generic advice caveats
You were (probably) linked here from some advice. Unfortunately, that advice has some caveats. See below:
* There exist some people who should not do the advice.
* Moreover, people are different.
* More moreover, situations are different. What worked there/then might not work here/now.
* So... |
d6a4d82e-6760-458a-bb9b-a28ace466742 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Choice := Anthropics uncertainty? And potential implications for agency
Epistemic status: half-baked thought
When an embedded agent - let's say Emmy - is faced with a choice from a set of actions (Ai)i∈1..n, she is uncertain about what type of decision maker she is in her epistemic position.
For every possible choi... |
ee1ac5f9-26c7-4776-86cf-accb698a84f4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Suggestions for naming a class of decision theories
In my recent post, I outlined 5 conditions that I'd like a decision theory to pass; TDT, UDT and ADT pass them, while CDT and EDT don't. I called decision theories that passed those conditions "advanced decision theories", but that's probably not an optimal name. Can... |
77223f7b-bd20-46f2-84df-14ebcfd179d0 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Content and Takeaways from SERI MATS Training Program with John Wentworth
Introduction
============
I participated in the training program for John Wentworth’s stream of [SERI MATS](https://www.serimats.org/), and overall, it was a very good experience! This post is meant to convey the content of the workshops, so th... |
c9379121-f1dc-4828-a2ce-a7658786c529 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | We cannot directly choose an AGI's utility function
This is my first post at this forum, and I am going to address a confusion that I believe some people have, and that may hinder some beginners from being able to contribute helpful ideas to the AI safety debate.
Namely, the confusion is the idea that we can choose a... |
fc62bfce-983a-4218-b477-13914b87f23b | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Is Bill Gates overly optomistic about AI?
[Bill Gates's blog](https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun) recently released an article that framed AI advancements in quite a positive light.
For example he touted many altruistic applications of AI coming in the near future and claimed that "none of the breakt... |
d9eaeba6-c2b2-45f1-9bcf-ed9d2ba924ba | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Is the "business cycle" an actual economic principle?
E.g. Investopedia: Business Cycle has a section "Stages of the Business Cycle":
> All business cycles are characterized by several different stages, as seen below.
> 1. Expansion. This is the first stage. When expansion occurs, there is an increase in employment,... |
76bd864f-4414-43db-849f-013c620aa9ec | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Succession
“A table beside the evening sea
where you sit shelling pistachios,
flicking the next open with the half-
shell of the last, story opening story,
on down to the sandy end of time.”
V1: Leaving
Deceleration is the hardest part. Even after burning almost all of my fuel, I’m still coming in at 0.8c. I’ve plan... |
a910099e-ba8a-45a9-b59d-60fe9a77cce5 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "Open Source AI" is a lie, but it doesn't have to be
NOTE: This post was updated to include two additional models which meet the criteria for being considered Open Source AI.
As advanced machine learning systems become increasingly widespread, the question of how to make them safe is also gaining attention. Within th... |
35fea274-eb1d-44b6-a37a-4960d2f149e8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Intrapersonal comparisons: you might be doing it wrong.
Cross-posted
Nothing weighty or profound today, but I noticed a failure mode in myself which other people might plausibly suffer from so I thought I'd share it.
Basically, I noticed that sometimes when I discovered a more effective way of doing something -- say... |
f4ff4b94-c9ed-4858-b41a-416af9daa71e | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | [SEQ RERUN] Expected Creative Surprises
Today's post, Expected Creative Surprises was originally published on 24 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
> The unpredictability of intelligence is a very special and unusual kind of surprise, which is not at all like noise or randomness. There is a weird ba... |
d56209b9-e5b5-4a7f-be81-f9b910d96534 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | "A good volunteer is hard to find"
From the GiveWell blog, which is often interesting & applicable to our interests, comes a post on the quality of their volunteers:
> "In our experience, valuable volunteers are rare. The people who email us about volunteer opportunities generally seem enthusiastic about GiveWell’s m... |
412c7c6a-e158-4e97-8ca9-e5e91673b897 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Chapter 68: Self Actualization, Pt 3
Hermione wasn't feeling very nice right now, or Good either, there was a hot ball of anger burning inside her and she wondered if this was something like Harry's darkness (though it probably wasn't even close) and she shouldn't have felt that way over some silly little game but -
... |
e2a57e89-f939-4b4e-951f-874027705208 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/eaforum | Effective Altruism Forum | Australians call for AI safety to be taken seriously
The Australian Government is considering how to regulate AI in Australia, has published a discussion paper ("[Safe and Responsible AI](https://consult.industry.gov.au/supporting-responsible-ai)"), and has invited feedback by 26 July 2023:
> "We want your views on ... |
49147435-70b0-4361-9c15-d99e055ea5b7 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Categorical-measure-theoretic approach to optimal policies tending to seek power
The paper Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power tries to justify the claim in the title with a mathematical argument, using a clever formal definition of "power". I like the general approach, but I think that parts of the formalisation do n... |
ef44939d-9080-495d-8f8a-603c4ea96d54 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Big Berkeley meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Big Berkeley meetup
WHEN: 30 May 2012 07:00:00PM (+0200)
WHERE: 2128 oxford street, berkeley, ca
The next Big Berkeley meetup is this Wednesday. Let's meet at 7pm in the Starbucks at 2128 Oxford St. as usual, and then decide where to go from there. I h... |
6463ae11-4743-44be-b473-4e3c27c8901b | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : Perth, Australia: Introducing Less Wrong
Discussion article for the meetup : Perth, Australia: Introducing Less Wrong
WHEN: 05 August 2014 06:00:00PM (+0800)
WHERE: Sync Labs, 6/663 Newcastle Street, Leederville WA 6007, Australia
What is Less Wrong? What are its central ideas? What is the Less Wrong commu... |
79a03a64-4a92-4a50-b5b3-846d8501e31f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Examples of mysteries explained *away*
I am looking for examples of mysterious answers that were eventually explained *away* by science. I can think of two: One is the belief that the behaviour of living things was explained by the mysterious force of elan vital, and not by mere chemistry; which was destroyed by the s... |
6447989a-55f8-4ae2-93d8-709a4c7871ea | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Fundamentals of Formalisation Level 5: Formal Proof
Followup to Fundamentals of Formalisation Level 4: Formal Semantics Basics. First post.
This is a new lesson of our online course on math formalizations required for AI safety research.
----------------------------------------
The big ideas:
* Natural Deduction ... |
7f7d4470-65c5-4072-96ba-f13a4e0a59a1 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Activation Magnitudes Matter On Their Own: Insights from Language Model Distributional Analysis
In my previous post, I explored the distributional properties of transformer activations, finding that they follow mixture distributions dominated by logistic-like or even heavier tailed primary components with minor modes ... |
8aa8ce48-cbe4-40b9-875c-def8eb1492a6 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
Daniel Dennett has [advanced the opinion](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_cute_sexy_sweet_funny.html) that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after... |
3f57a995-d8e0-4abd-8c89-ba6ae130de8f | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Weekly LW Meetups: Copenhagen, Dallas, Graz, London, Longmont, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Sydney, Vancouver, Washington
There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:
* Longmont Sparkfun Soldering Competition Field Trip: 28 April 2012 11:00AM
* Graz Meetup: 28 April 2012 11:21PM
* First Copenhagen mee... |
ad95e37e-2061-437e-bfff-a23489ff4d71 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Systems and stories
Tyler claims we think of most things in terms of stories, which he says is both largely inevitable and one of our biggest biases.
He includes the abstractions of non fiction as ‘stories’, and recommends ‘messiness’ as a better organising principle for understanding our lives and other things. But ... |
6a22f6cc-cef2-4630-89e2-e15c3f6fba31 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | When does capability elicitation bound risk?
For a summary of this post, see the thread on X.
The assumptions behind and limitations of capability elicitation have been discussed in multiple places (e.g. here, here, here, etc); however, none of these match my current picture.
For example, Evan Hubinger’s “When can w... |
eba0aa94-49b7-402e-a7cd-a54b172fde1a | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Misalignment-by-default in multi-agent systems
Summary of this post
--------------------
This is the second post in a three-part [sequence](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/HBMLmW9WsgsdZWg4R) on instrumental convergence in multi-agent RL. [Read Part 1 here.](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/pGvM95EfNXwBzjNCJ/expe... |
1d3087e5-c386-4c6f-848d-2d7ddaf46985 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What Hayek Taught Us About Nature
> Preface for the reader: F.A. Hayek was an author and economist who wrote a critique of centralized fascist and communist governments in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," in 1944. His work was later celebrated as a call for free-market capitalism.
Say what you will about Fried... |
036fbc35-56e4-430f-98b2-a14780255301 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Three new papers on AI risk
In case you aren't subscribed to FriendlyAI.tumblr.com for the latest updates on AI risk research, I'll mention here that three new papers on the subject were recently made available online...
Bostrom (2012). The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced... |
349e27ad-a474-4468-a6f0-995d9fda1659 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/special_docs | Other | Exploring AI Safety in Degrees: Generality, Capability and Control
Exploring AI Safety in Degrees:
Generality, Capability and Control
John Burden
University of York
jjb531@york.ac.ukJos´e Hern ´andez-Orallo
Universitat Polit `ecnica de Val `encia, Spain
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge, UK
j... |
f7fdc86a-8c65-484b-8157-c923c2ef0ebe | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Did they use serological testing for COVID vaccine trials?
Or did they correct somehow for false positive/negatives of the type of testing that they did use? |
6ca6740d-b1e6-42cd-b2ae-10be0a466b02 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Interim Research Report: Mechanisms of Awareness
Summary
Reproducing a result from recent work, we study a Gemma 3 12B instance trained to take risky or safe options; the model can then report its own risk tolerance. We find that:
* Applying LoRA to a single MLP is enough to reproduce the behavior
* The single Lo... |
84d13387-7650-4552-863b-42219e94f157 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Causal abstractions vs infradistributions
**Summary**: I illustrate the relationship between Wentworth-style causal abstractions and infradistributions, and how they both deal with nonrealizability by throwing away information. If you have a basic intuition for causal abstractions, this might help you understand infra... |
53d3cd2a-114b-4e35-9b55-63f5c3858bd2 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/lesswrong | LessWrong | Linkpost: Are Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models just In-Context Learning?
A new preprint, [Lu et al.](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01809), published last month, has important implications for AI risk if true. It essentially suggests that emergent capabilities of current LLMs are (with some exceptions) mediated... |
3719f480-adf3-4182-863a-ef99f004e8a2 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Some rules for life (v.0,0)
Epistemic status: I have not lived very long yet, so whatever life wisdom I have accumulated so far is nothing compared to that of my future 1,000-year-old self. Consider me foolish in comparison. Also, this advice worked for me but obviously adapt it as you see fit. Entirely based on perso... |
6a405bdc-97e2-47f6-9561-8080bfc845ab | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Meetup : West LA—What, Exactly, Is a Person?
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—What, Exactly, Is a Person?
WHEN: 11 September 2013 07:00:00PM (-0700)
WHERE: 10850 West Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064, USA
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside... |
2d34a3c9-45d2-4deb-a309-4a1b568dfca0 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Welcome to Kyiv SlateStarCodex
(The following are our suggestions for what kind of information is best to include in the welcome post of your group, feel free to replace them with whatever you think is best)
What kind of events does your group usually run? What does it usually do?
How frequently does your group orga... |
864052f6-0be2-407d-8889-1f74d9008c47 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Running and Optimizing
Two years ago I decided I was going to start running between my house and the subway station each day on my commute, for a total of about five miles a week. Initially I was very interested in getting faster, and would time myself a couple days a week, trying to beat my previous best:
Unfortun... |
080df08f-ec60-434c-8771-2b01e273f5cc | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | How do you Select the Right Research Acitivity in the Right Moment?
In doing research, I have a bunch of activities that I engage in, including but not limited to:
* Figuring out the best thing to do.
* Talking out loud to force my ideas into language.
* Trying to explain an idea on the whiteboard.
* Writing pseu... |
d02768be-6531-4a82-a397-98f3098be2f8 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Less Wrong fanfiction suggestion
I've been enjoying reading Less Wrong fanfiction, and I wanted to suggest another fandom that should have at least one rationalist fanfiction: Mage: The Awakening. It's a roleplaying game about "modern sorcery." My description can't really do it justice... |
cac47844-b458-47ca-a04a-3e0dff031112 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | More Is Different for AI
Machine learning is touching increasingly many aspects of our society, and its effect will only continue to grow. Given this, I and many others care about risks from future ML systems and how to mitigate them.
When thinking about safety risks from ML, there are two common approaches, which I'... |
ff753df4-03b6-4c27-93ec-2715b54685fb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Pointing to a Flower
Imagine I have a highly detailed low-level simulation (e.g. molecular dynamics) of a garden. The initial conditions include a flower, and I would like to write some code to “point” to that particular flower. At any given time, I should be able to use this code to do things like:
* compute a boun... |
207a78f4-c882-4f47-ad68-9e9f01dc88c3 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | 50 things I learned at NIPS AI and machine learning conference 2016
|
80fda8f2-0c2c-41f4-8d8b-23412465f0d4 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Back to the Basics of Rationality
My deconversion from Christianity had a large positive impact on my life. I suspect it had a small positive impact on the world, too. (For example, I no longer condemn gays or waste time and money on a relationship with an imaginary friend.) And my deconversion did not happen because ... |
8517398e-d5c3-4819-a34a-76a9f7104bcb | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | Control Vectors as Dispositional Traits
I have been reading recently about a technique that can be used to partially control the behaviour of Large Language Models: the technique is exploiting control vectors[1] to alter the activation patterns of the LLMs and trigger some desired behaviour. While the technique does n... |
b1bc997c-4391-4b2c-977c-2e8e87720e62 | trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k | LessWrong | What are the best examples of catastrophic resource shortages?
A while ago I posed a question on Twitter:
> What's an example of a significant resource that the world has actually run out of?
>
> Not a local, temporary shortage, or a resource that we gracefully transitioned away from, but like a significant problem ... |
65f94d5b-4dab-4a99-8b7f-72871f7a7b34 | StampyAI/alignment-research-dataset/alignmentforum | Alignment Forum | Instrumental convergence: scale and physical interactions
Summary of this post
--------------------
This is the third post in a three-part [sequence](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/HBMLmW9WsgsdZWg4R) on instrumental convergence in multi-agent RL. Read [Part 1](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/pGvM95EfNXwBzjNCJ/... |
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